1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to computing systems for enterprises and application service providers and, more specifically, to processing systems having virtualized communication networks.
2. Discussion of Related Art
In current enterprise computing and application service provider environments, personnel from multiple information technology (IT) functions (electrical, networking, etc.) must participate to deploy processing and networking resources. Consequently, because of scheduling and other difficulties in coordinating activities from multiple departments, it can take weeks or months to deploy a new computer server. This lengthy, manual process increases both human and equipment costs, and delays the launch of applications.
Moreover, because it is difficult to anticipate how much processing power applications will require, managers typically over-provision the amount of computational power. As a result, data-center computing resources often go unutilized or under-utilized.
If more processing power is eventually needed than originally provisioned, the various IT functions will again need to coordinate activities to deploy more or improved servers, connect them to the communication and storage networks and so forth. This task gets increasingly difficult as the systems become larger.
Deployment is also problematic. For example, when deploying 24 conventional servers, more than 100 discrete connections may be required to configure the overall system. Managing these cables is an ongoing challenge, and each represents a failure point. Attempting to mitigate the risk of failure by adding redundancy can double the cabling, exacerbating the problem while increasing complexity and costs.
Provisioning for high availability with today's technology is a difficult and costly proposition. Generally, a failover server must be deployed for every primary server. In addition, complex management software and professional services are usually required.
Generally, it is not possible to adjust the processing power or upgrade the CPUs on a legacy server. Instead, scaling processor capacity and/or migrating to a vendor's next-generation architecture often requires a “forklift upgrade,” meaning more hardware/software systems are added, needing new connections and the like.
Consequently, there is a need for a system and method of providing a platform for enterprise and ASP computing that addresses the above shortcomings.